# Building the Great Pyramid

How Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza was built, around 2560 BC, told on a diorama of the plateau

By sunny\-panda\-8b922f66

Topic: History

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## Transcript

### 1. A Tomb for a King

Around 2560 BC, King Khufu of Egypt chose this rocky plateau above the Nile at Giza for his tomb\. His builders would raise a mountain of stone here, 146\.6 metres tall\. For almost 3,900 years it was the tallest building on Earth\.

Its square base is 230\.3 metres on each side and covers more than 5 hectares\.

### 2. Level and Square

First the builders levelled the rock and laid out a perfect square\. They probably found true north from the stars, which wheel around the pole every night\. The finished sides face north, south, east and west to within about a tenth of a degree\.

In Khufu’s time the pole star was Thuban, not Polaris: the sky slowly shifts over thousands of years\.

### 3. Cut Beside the Site

Most of the stone came from a quarry right next to the pyramid\. Workers cut deep channels around each block with copper chisels, then split it from the bedrock with wooden wedges and levers\. An average block weighs about 2\.5 tonnes, as much as two cars\.

Copper is too soft for granite\. Granite was shaped by pounding it with balls of even harder dolerite\.

### 4. Wet the Sand

Blocks rode on wooden sledges, pulled by teams with ropes\. A painting in the tomb of Djehutihotep shows a man pouring water in front of a sledge\. Wet sand stays firm, so the runners glide instead of piling up sand ahead of them\.

In 2014 physicists in Amsterdam found that the right amount of water roughly halves the force needed to pull a sledge over sand\.

### 5. The Workers’ Town

The builders were not slaves\. They were crews of farmers and craftsmen, paid in bread, beer and meat, who lived in a town beside the site with bakeries and long sleeping halls\. Archaeologists have found their bread moulds and the bones of the cattle and fish they ate\.

Herodotus claimed 100,000 workers\. Archaeologists now think 20,000 to 30,000 at most, with only a few thousand on the pyramid at once\.

### 6. Granite from Aswan

The pink granite for the King’s Chamber came from Aswan, roughly 800 km to the south\. Boats carried the heavy beams down the Nile, best during the summer flood, when the water reached almost to the foot of the plateau\. You can see the granite rising inside the pyramid\.

A papyrus diary kept by an official named Merer records his boat trips carrying limestone to Giza for Khufu\. It is the oldest inscribed papyrus ever found\.

### 7. Up the Ramps

Teams hauled the blocks up ramps of rubble and mud brick\. Nobody knows the design for certain: a long straight ramp, a zigzag up one face, or one that wrapped around the pyramid\. Egyptologists still debate it\.

In 2018 a steep ramp with post holes on both sides was found at the Hatnub quarry\. The posts may have helped haulers pull their ropes\.

### 8. Twenty Years, Course by Course

About 2\.3 million blocks went up in roughly 20 years, one every two minutes of daylight\. Because a pyramid narrows as it rises, most of the stone sits near the bottom: halfway through the work, it stood at only a fifth of its final height\.

A third of the way up, about 70% of all the stone was already in place\.

### 9. The Capstone

Last of all came the pyramidion, the capstone at the very top\. Khufu’s has never been found, so nobody knows exactly what it looked like, or whether it was covered in gold\.

Capstones from later pyramids survive: the one from Amenemhat III’s pyramid is polished black granite\.

### 10. The Shining Pyramid

Finally the whole pyramid was faced with fine white limestone from Tura, dressed smooth from the top down as the ramps came away\. In the sun it gleamed\. Most of this casing was later carried off to build medieval Cairo, which is why the pyramid looks stepped today\.

Today it stands about 138\.5 metres tall: the capstone and the top few metres are gone\.